I recently had the privilege of working with a mayor and city council in a mid-sized community. The mayor had requested my help after the city council meetings became punctuated by acrimony and verbal abuse and characterized by an inability to get city council work done. This particular city government had nine elected city council members, representing different districts in the city, and a mayor who functioned as a CEO of the city government corporation.
According to the city charter, the city council and mayor should work together, with the mayor providing leadership, ideas, and information with which to work toward council decisions. Some ten years earlier, the town had been governed by a mayor and a group of city commissioners who represented functions rather than districts. At the time of my intervention, there was a strongly debated suggestion to shift to a city manager form of government. Clearly this city was in considerable confusion about how it wanted to be governed and what would be most efficient.
The primary problem quickly became apparent, as I wrote after my intervention in a letter to the editor of the local newspaper:
Any complex organization of elected members has the task of learning to govern, a very different skill than that necessary to get elected. Over time, people who represent very different, more narrow points of view must learn to work together for the good of the whole.
This is not an easy task, but one very possible for this city council. City council members are paid very little for exhausting work in addition to a fulltime job in most instances. Tolerating disagreement is an essential part of the functioning of the city council. Strongly held views are often expressed in angry ways and such disagreement is healthy for a full debate of the issues. Acrimony, however, can be avoided and I believe our city council and mayor will do their best to avoid it.
The typical approach to conflict in organizations of this nature is to try to shift the “vision” of the organization. This city council had already had several attempts at developing long-term visions and plans for the sorts of issues the city needed to deal with. There was widespread feeling that rational clarification and development of agreed-upon rules for conduct would solve the problem.
I've observed on more than one occasion that in spite of skill, experience, and sophistication on the part of members of governments and consultants to governments, unconscious processes are very often completely ignored. I felt that my role as an analyst, as in a number of prior consultations, was to identify the unconscious and preconscious determinants of some of the difficulties and to provide a mechanism by which the members could understand what was going on and take steps to right the problem. Thus my intervention did not create a new vision, but instead became a time for self reflection. Following a pattern long established in psychoanalytic treatment, 1 interviewed each city council member individually in depth to get some idea of them as people and the sorts of issues they considered to lie at the root of the conflict.
I was universally impressed by their dedication; in light of the very small amount of money paid them, I was amazed at the amount of time and work each council member dedicated to his or her role on the city council, often with extensive additional community service. That very enthusiasm, commitment, and dedication to service seemed to be what made it hard for this group to work together, since their views were so passionately held. The mayor — a woman with extensive prior political experience in state government — was equally enthusiastic and committed to the benefit of the community.
After the interviews, we had two retreat segments, one of some four hours and one of two hours. The format was highly structured. I gave the participants my view of the problems derived from the interviews with them, couched in psychoanalytic language. There was a lot of time available for members to share the sorts of issues that motivated them to stand for office, with a goal of focusing on issues rather than personalities. With this format, focused on introspection and fact finding, we strongly avoided blame and attempted to reach consensus in a collaborative way. The general tenor of the retreat was surprisingly positive, as if positive feelings between members had been dammed up. It was obvious that a number enjoyed the opportunity to speak in a more constructive way about each other and more idealistically about their own motives.
Interestingly, because of local government rules and regulations, the retreat was open to the public; a reporter was present, together with a group of people who were regular attendees at city council meetings. The reporter functioned as a remarkably unbiased and accurate recorder of the process.
Several stable themes emerged, which I presented to the group as dynamics derived from my interviews.
Although party, gender, and race are traditional thorns in the side of such organizations, in this instance they seemed stable, chronic issues and not basic to the problems. The council and mayor each felt bullied by the other, often feeling victimized and infantalized. These roles were constantly shifting. As a result of the traumatizing effect of these experiences on each, all members now felt in a double bind: Nothing they did was correct or would even ever be seen to be correct.
Each time any two members got into a fight, they felt deserted by their traditional supporters, who functioned as bystanders and did not help.
Finally, overall, there was a consequent loss of what was called respect and trust.
The mayor and council members agreed with these overviews, which gave me an opportunity to introduce certain psychoanalytic concepts. Transference was discussed as the way the
Stuart W. Twemlow, M.D., is director of the Erikson Institute for Research and Education at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.. He is also co-director of the Peaceful Schools Project of the Child and Family Center and a faculty member of the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.
past shapes perception of the present. The members brought up examples of how views created by one set of traumas made them far less open to seeing things later from a new perspective. I was able to identify and give examples of several power struggles that were intensified by exhaustion and which created regression. Projective identification became a widely used concept: Council members realized they were at times acting in ways that did not represent what they really felt, but they would get caught up in the struggle and the moment and often say things that they later regretted but yet seemed to continue to control them.
Paranoia — that is, exaggerated suspiciousness — resulted from all these phenomena, aggravated by the mind-wrenching effects of the double bind. The group was quick to point out that paranoia usually has a seed of truth in it. Nonetheless, each member was able to see how these defenses, with attendant feelings of being traumatized and exhausted, exaggerated these suspicions. We spent much time identifying examples that explained both the feelings and the content of the interactions that had been very unproductive. (It should be noted that the city council meetings were often televised, which put additional pressure on the council members in front of their electorate.)
Having set the scene, what was next needed was a model to understand the process and to give suggestions about what to do about it. Specifically, what seemed to be needed was a way of creating an atmosphere where disagreement was possible without acrimony. A model based on power dynamics (the conscious or unconscious desire of one person to dominate another) proved useful. Each member of the group was able to identify when he or she tended to take the roles of bully, victim, or bystander who facilitated the bully-victim interaction. The dialectical way the roles of bully, victim, and bystander developed had very high-face validity for this group, and members gave numerous examples of such actions occurring. They realized that the mindset of each person in the bully, victim, and bystander roles would affect his or her ability to consider the issues in an objective way. The emphasis here was on self-analysis, not the analysis of other participants.
Although no dramatic shifts in functioning were expected from this intervention, there was general agreement that the tone of city council meetings and their productivity improved markedly. The mayor especially adopted a role much less sensitive to aggression and was visibly more tolerant of questions about her opinions and judgment. She was able quite successfully to resist overreacting to anger and thus could function more as a mediator and less as a scapegoat.
Although there are much deeper ways of analyzing this city council's functioning, based on personal interpretations of the individuals concerned, it would not be appropriate for me to disclose these for public view. Suffice to say that even though my understanding of the group's psychopathology was aided immensely by personal, individual knowledge of each person, it was certainly not necessary to the functioning of the group for the gory details of unconscious difficulties to be laid bare for public view. Nor did it appear useful for me to play a passive, observational role — that is, a group “therapist” commenting on the dynamics of the group. This newer model was intended to provide a psychoanalytically influenced psychoeducational experience that would give the members specific tools with which to understand their behavior.
In working with such an organization, the analyst needs to provide something with high commonsense appeal that is immediately useful for self-understanding. Time must be made available to allow personal observations and examples for each new concept and to foster a state of mind that encourages not only self observation but also reflection on the unconscious determinants of other people's reactions — not to hurt or give political advantage, but in the service of understanding.
I believe it was useful for the members to realize that each of them had idealistic motives, at least in part, for their interest in working on the city council and to be able to share some of these in an atmosphere of understanding and hope. They began to realize how little they knew of each other personally, how it would be of considerable value to have some training and support for new council members, and how from time to time self-examination like that afforded by this retreat would be a helpful break from the hurly-burly and pressure of day-to-day council activities. As an added benefit, such an approach de-mystifies psychoanalysis in the eyes of the public and enables the average citizen to see our field as useful.
To some, it seems remarkable that a psychiatrist was asked to intervene in such a setting. Certainly it is worth summarizing the sorts of fears that may be present prior to an intervention by a psychoanalyst. It is worth listing these because they are the sorts of transferences we will experience when intervening with those who are not clearly willing to identify themselves as patients. The following comments were reported in the local newspaper prior to the intervention:
“I don't want to see the retreat turn into a therapy session.”
“If you disagree with someone, does that mean you're crazy?”
“My religion does not agree with psychiatry or psychology.”